age is a rebellion. "My husband," she said, "is always increasingly
absorbed in his legal duties, of which I understand nothing, and which so
do not interest me. My children are all growing up and at school. I have
servants enough to attend to my house. When he comes home in the evening,
if I try to amuse him by telling him of the things I have been doing during
the day, of the bazaars I am working for, the shopping I have done, the
visits I have paid, he is bored. He is anxious to get away to his study,
his books, and his men friends, and I am left utterly alone. If it were
not for the society of women and other men with whom I have more in common,
I could not bear my life. When we first met as boy and girl, and fell in
love, we danced and rode together and seemed to have everything in common;
now we have nothing. I respect him and I believe he respects me, but that
is all!" It is, perhaps, only in close confidences between man and man and
woman and woman that this open sore, rising from the divergence in
training, habits of life, and occupation between men and women is spoken
of; but it lies as a tragic element at the core of millions of modern
conjugal relations, beneath the smooth superficial surface of our modern
life; breaking out to the surface only occasionally in the revelations of
our divorce courts.)

It is a gracious fact, to which every woman who has achieved success or
accomplished good work in any of the fields generally apportioned to men
will bear witness, whether that work be in the field of literature, of
science, or the organised professions, that the hands which have been most
eagerly stretched our to welcome her have been those of men; that the
voices which have most generously acclaimed her success have been those of
male fellow-workers in the fields into which she has entered.

There is no door at which the hand of woman has knocked for admission into
a new field of toil but there have been found on the other side the hands